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Introducing the Visual Studio Pattern Automation Toolkit (VSPAT)

A large part of the work in developing any application of significant value is repetitious, uninteresting and time-consuming. This provides excellent opportunities for automation through custom tooling to eliminate error-prone and repetitious work. There are many challenges, however, in creating the tools to do the automation. Either they are quick and dirty, and therefore limited in capability, hard to maintain, and hard to use; or they are full-featured and expensive to develop and maintain. The Visual Studio Pattern Automation Toolkit (VSPAT), a Visual Studio extension, bridges the gap between these extremes, creating full-featured toolkits that are quick and easy to build and easy for developers to use. VSPAT simplifies the process of developing custom tools – it is a toolkit for creating toolkits. This paper will provide an overview of VSPAT and provide an example of its use, illustrating all of the key capabilities and features it provides.